1986
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
This is a tale of two worlds.
The planet Valedon has a highly regimented, restrictive class structure. It has a cash economy in which no one gives anything away for free. And it is part of a multi-planet administrative “Protectorship” ruled from afar by a single “Patriarch” on another planet in another solar system.
Valedon is also a world built around stone. Its inhabitants use stone for everything: as their mode of currency, primarily, but also in their artwork, in their names, and as the symbols of their professions.
Valedon’s moon, Shora, is the opposite of Valedon in almost every way. The entire surface of the moon is covered by ocean, and its inhabitants live on rafts of naturally-occurring vegetable matter floating on the surface of the water. They govern themselves communally, making decisions in consensus-based, non-hierarchical “Gatherings.” They have no cash; everything they need is either provided by the planet or they make it themselves. When they have something in plenty, they give it freely to others who need it.
They are also all female. They reproduce by parthenogenesis in a carefully controlled way, making sure that their population is always roughly a constant size. To the Shorans, every form of life on their moon (a richly and originally thought-out biosphere) has a place, and the balance between all of them must be respected and carefully maintained.
This sets up a tidy contrast between a prototypical patriarchy on Valedon, with its mercantile economy and war-prone population, and an ultimate matriarchy on Shora, where they don’t have any pronouns for males and the worst possible punishment an individual can imagine is to have the rest of her raft-mates refuse to speak to her.
At the time the book starts, the Valans have already established a beachhead of a sort on Shora: a small number of Valan traders have set up shops on empty rafts and are selling bits of manufactured metal products to the Shorans in exchange for goods that the Shorans produce anyway for themselves, like woven sea-silk and natural medications. This has already created some tension; some of the Shorans desire the Valans’ technology, while others are upset that the Valans’ loud motorboats are disrupting the undersea songs of the giant indigenous starworms.
There is eventually enough unrest that the Shorans decide to send a delegation to Valedon to find out whether the Valans are honorable and worth continuing to deal with, or if they should be expelled forever from the moon. One member of the delegation (and one of our primary narrators), Merwen, is probably the most understanding person on Shora, and even she has a hard time relating to the Valans.
Although, to be fair, she is pretty confusing herself, and her behavior isn’t exactly calculated to make connections. After a frustrating amount of inaction and passivity, mostly involving her sitting and weaving underneath a tree in a city park while giving incomprehensible answers to any Valan who is brave enough to approach her, she eventually forges a relationship with just one Valan: Spinel, the dissolute son of a stonecutter, whom she invites to come back to Shora with her.
Partly because of Spinel’s visit to their world, the Shorans provisionally decide not to kick the Valans out. This turns out to be a huge mistake when the Valans’ Patriarch becomes intrigued by the “untapped mineral potential” of Shora’s ocean floor, and decides to invade. He sends General Realgar, Commander of the Protectoral Guard, up to Shora with an army to take control of the ocean moon.
Realgar wages his invasion using traditional Protectorship methods—threats, guns, torture, imprisonment. But he finds a baffling, incomprehensible foe in the people of Shora, who meet every assault with unwavering passive resistance. Indeed, both sides find that everything they do instinctively, according to their own cultural standards, is infuriating to the other, and elicits exactly the opposite response that they expect.
The Shorans think that the idea of killing another human being is morally repellant, and that the Valans are unprincipled, sick children who are dead inside, and everything the Valans do reinforces that impression. The Shorans refuse to react to force with force, so their numbers dwindle and their pain grows as more and more of them are kidnapped and killed by Realgar’s men.
The Valans think that the Shorans are crazy suicidal terrorists, willing to walk by the dozens into their gunfire, and everything the Shorans do reinforces that impression. General Realgar can’t seem to comprehend that the more he tightens his grip, the more Shora will slip through his fingers. He doesn’t realize that if he continues his warlike approach, he’s going to have to continue until every single Shoran is dead.
It is a powerful thought experiment: how people can be so culturally polarized that cooperation and peace is impossible. And it’s therefore impossible to avoid comparing this book to Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. Both are tales about the inhabitants of two worlds—a planet and its moon, in both cases—that have such radically different cultures that they are unable to comprehend each other. And in both books, only a very small number of people are able to make connections in both societies and to serve as potential conduits of acceptance and understanding.
LeGuin’s book did a better job, however, at allowing you to explore the different social structures on the opposing worlds. It presented the pros and cons of both sides without a glaringly obvious bias towards one or the other. It. And it had a more interesting plot and a main character with clearer motivations.
A Door into Ocean felt much more scattered. The plot was frustratingly meandering, the heroines and heroes were passive and inarticulate, and the confrontations between opposing sides were confusing and usually lacking in any resolution of anything.
The Valans were cruel and brutish, so it was easy to understand where they were coming from. But it was often hard to understand the reactions and motives of the Shorans. They seemed to sink into vagueness when it was least convenient (like when they were being interrogated by a Valan official). They often answered even direct questions in riddles—not, it seems, because they wanted to, but because they got flustered and couldn’t think of what to say. And when they were most shocked or frightened, they would escape into a coma-like trance and not come out of it for days.
It also bugged me that the Shoran’s worst possible punishment was to basically give each other the silent treatment. It’s a stereotypical way that women are often accused of dealing with problems—through passive aggression—and it made them seem a bit like a society of self-righteous eighth-grade girls.
None of these things are going to get the Valans off your moon without having a lot of your people die. Passive resistance and civil disobedience can be tremendously successful techniques for social change, but by themselves they may not be enough. Your self-sacrifice often needs to be paired with strong communicators who can articulate your issues and explain your actions. If it isn’t, you may just get slaughtered for no reason.
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